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In a bid for some of the Bush administration's $1.2 billion promised funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, the former head of the Bonneville Power Administration yesterday unveiled at a Seattle conference an ambitious proposal to make the Pacific Northwest "the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen."

At the same meeting, one of the most influential thinkers at the alternative and environmental end of the energy policy debate agreed that the Northwest is uniquely poised to become a world leader in helping make the "hydrogen transition" away from petroleum-based transportation fuels.

"This region is the most suited of any place in North America to move rapidly toward hydrogen," said Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., an Oxford University-educated physicist, a frequent critic of current energy policies and one of the world's leading lights in matters of alternative energy.

"We're already the Saudi Arabia of water," said Jack Robertson, who retired from BPA in 1999 and formed the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. "Because of the Columbia River, the Northwest can produce hydrogen cheaper, faster and cleaner than anyone else in the world."

Robertson and Lovins were two speakers at a conference on "Hydrogen Production and Northwest Transportation" sponsored by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. The national lab is a leader in the development of fuel cell technology and other technologies aimed at reducing the nation's energy dependence on imported oil.

Hydrogen power is based on the use of chemical "fuel cells" that can tap the energy (electricity and heat) produced from the chemical transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. Hydrogen power holds the promise of a cleaner and renewable energy resource.

"It's clean, renewable and it doesn't come from an unstable part of the world," Robertson said. To put this region's advantage in perspective, he noted that for a person standing on the banks of the Columbia River, enough hydrogen in the river water passes by in just one second to fuel 600,000 passenger cars for 24 hours.

At the meeting, Robertson was rallying support for a proposal he's calling the Northwest Hydrogen Initiative. The basic idea is to use off-peak hydropower to generate cheap hydrogen fuel that would run a fleet of vehicles within five years, contribute to the city of Seattle's future energy needs and launch the beginnings of a hydrogen production-distribution system that could become a model for the rest of the world. Robertson hopes to garner enough public and private interest in the proposal to submit it to the Bush administration for funding.

"Basically, we're trying to develop the energy system of the future," said Mike Lawrence, associate director for energy science at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The two biggest hurdles for hydrogen fuel today, Lawrence said, are the relatively high costs of the fuel cells and figuring out how to create an efficient system for producing and distributing this new fuel.

Lovins has been pushing the hydrogen-fueled car idea for more than a decade. The Rocky Mountain Institute has spun off a company, called Hypercar Inc., to promote to automakers its design of an extremely lightweight, carbon-based vehicle that aims to make hydrogen an attractive, economical fuel right now. He said some of the big automakers have shown interest now that the Bush administration appears willing to put some money into developing a hydrogen-powered car.

"Unfortunately, the administration has created the impression among environmentalists that this is just a way of distracting people from pursuing (current) hydrogen technology," Lovins said. "It could either be a triumph or a bust."

But no matter what the Bush administration hopes to achieve with its so-called "Freedom Car" initiative, he predicted that hydrogen fuel ultimately would replace petroleum for a variety of reasons.

"For one thing, it should be clear to everyone by now that our oil dependency is contrary to our economic and national security interests," Lovins said. But despite such policy influences, he said the marketplace is already pushing us toward what he calls the "hydrogen transition." Dupont, British Petroleum and other major corporations, Lovins said, already are looking at alternative energies simply because they are looking cheaper.

Eventually, he said, petroleum's direct and indirect costs will make it so unattractive that we won't have to run out of oil before we stop using it as our primary energy resource.

"Somebody once said, 'The stone age didn't end because the world ran out of stones,' " Lovins said. "The oil endgame has started. We are already entering the hydrogen era."

Making a hydrogen-powered vehicle is not the problem. They already exist. The trick will be getting the pure hydrogen out of the water cheaply enough to compete in price against gasoline. That's the advantage the Northwest has now over everyone, according to Robertson. Using off-peak hydropower, he thinks he can produce hydrogen fuel right now for about $2 a gallon.

"We are very close with the existing technology," he said. "We're not talking about inventing anything new."